MongoDB/Mongoid: search for documents matching first item in array - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a document that has an array:
{
_id: ObjectId("515e10784903724d72000003"),
association_chain: [
{
name: "Product",
id: ObjectId("4e1e2cdd9a86652647000003")
}
],
//...
}
I'm trying to search the collection for documents where the name of the first item in the association_chain array matches a given value.
How can I do this using Mongoid? Or if you only know how this can be done using MongoDB, if you post an example, then I could probably figure out how to do it with Mongoid.

Answer 1

Use the positional operator. You can query the first element of an array with .0 (and the second with .1, etc).
> db.items.insert({association_chain: [{name: 'foo'}, {name: 'bar'}]})
> db.items.find({"association_chain.0.name": "foo"})
{ "_id" : ObjectId("516348865862b60b7b85d962"), "association_chain" : [ { "name" : "foo" }, { "name" : "bar" } ] }
You can see that the positional operator is in effect since searching for foo in the second element doesn't return a hit...
> db.items.find({"association_chain.1.name": "foo"})
>
...but searching for bar does.
> db.items.find({"association_chain.1.name": "bar"})
{ "_id" : ObjectId("516348865862b60b7b85d962"), "association_chain" : [ { "name" : "foo" }, { "name" : "bar" } ] }
You can even index this specific field without indexing all the names of all the association chain documents:
> db.items.ensureIndex({"association_chain.0.name": 1})
> db.items.find({"association_chain.0.name": "foo"}).explain()
{
"cursor" : "BtreeCursor association_chain.0.name_1",
"nscanned" : 1,
...
}
> db.items.find({"association_chain.1.name": "foo"}).explain()
{
"cursor" : "BasicCursor",
"nscanned" : 3,
...
}

Answer 2

Two ways to do this:
1) if you already know that you're only interested in the first product name appearing in "association_chain", then this is better:
db.items.find("association_chain.0.name":"something")
Please note that this does not return all items, which mention the desired product, but only those which mention it in the first position of the 'association_chain' array.
If you want to do this, then you'll need an index:
db.items.ensureIndex({"association_chain.0.name":1},{background:1})
2) if you are looking for a specific product, but you are not sure in which position of the association_chain it appears, then do this:
With the MongoDB shell you can access any hash key inside a nested structure with the '.' dot operator! Please note that this is independent of how deeply that key is nested in the record (isn't that cool?)
You can do a find on an embedded array of hashes like this:
db.items.find("association_chain.name":"something")
This returns all records in the collection which contain the desired product mentioned anywhere in the association_array.
If you want to do this, you should make sure that you have an index:
db.items.ensureIndex({"association_chain.name":1},{background: 1})
See "Dot Notation" on this page: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/document/

Answer 3

You can do this with the aggregation framework. In the mongo shell run a query that unwinds the documents so you have a document per array element (with duplicated data in the other fields), then group by id and any other field you want to include, plus the array with the operator $first. Then just include the $match operator to filter by name or mongoid.
Here's the query to match by the first product name:
db.foo.aggregate([
{ $unwind:"$association_chain"
},
{
$group : {
"_id" : {
"_id" : "$_id",
"other" : "$other"
},
"association_chain" : {
$first : "$association_chain"
}
}
},
{ $match:{ "association_chain.name":"Product"}
}
])
Here's how to query for the first product by mongoid:
db.foo.aggregate([
{ $unwind:"$association_chain"
},
{
$group : {
"_id" : {
"_id" : "$_id",
"other" : "$other"
},
"association_chain" : {
$first : "$association_chain"
}
}
},
{ $match:{ "association_chain.id":ObjectId("4e1e2cdd9a86652647000007")}
}
])